Russia Convicts Chechen Rebel Commander Shown in Taped Execution

Clad in fatigues and a beret, the Chechen commander laughs, kicks one prostrate Russian soldier, waves a pistol in the air, then steps up to a kneeling soldier and shoots him in the head.

Salautdin Temirbulatov, 41, was convicted and sentenced to life in prison Thursday on evidence created by his own men: an April 1996 videotape of him executing the soldier, Sergei Mitryayev.

Temirbulatov, known as “the Tractorist” from his days as a tractor driver on a Soviet collective farm, is the only notable Chechen rebel commander in the current conflict to have been captured and convicted by Russian authorities.

Arrested last March in what the Russians claim was a special operation, he was charged with four murders, several kidnappings and fighting in a rebel group against Russia. He was convicted Thursday on all counts.

Such tapes were readily available in Chechnya after the first war, which ended in the summer of 1996 with the Russians’ withdrawal from the separatist republic. But after countless screenings of the Temirbulatov video on Russian television in recent months, he has become one of the most notorious Chechen commanders.

Tamara Mitryayev, 70, has watched her son’s last moments replayed many times on the TV news.

“I don’t remember how many times I saw my dear little son Seryozha die on the screen,” she said, sobbing throughout a telephone interview at the phone exchange in her town of Lesogorsk, near Nizhny Novgorod, east of Moscow. She has no phone at home.

“I can’t think of anything else. When I close my eyes, I still see him on his knees in the mud with his hands tied behind his back. I see it and I cry and cry and cry. Did I bring him into this world for this?”

Russia has suspended use of the death penalty, and Tamara Mitryayev is angered by the life sentence.

“They decided to spare this beast’s life,” she said, weeping. “I want him to be killed, publicly executed. I want to see it on the video the way I saw my son’s death a dozen times on television.”

For Russia’s authorities, bogged down in messy military action in Chechnya, the Tractorist video helped ignite public outrage against the Chechen rebels and engender support for the war.

The Russians have failed to capture more prominent rebel leaders such as Shamil Basayev; the warlord Khattab; or Aslan Maskhadov, leader of the former Chechen government. The Temirbulatov trial became a symbolic court case against a captured rebel.

Vyacheslav Izmailov, a specialist on Chechnya for the Novaya Gazeta newspaper, has no doubt that Temirbulatov was guilty, but the case still seemed to him to be a show trial.

“I can’t help feeling great bitterness now because I know that thousands of Chechens were arrested by federal troops but then disappeared without a trace. I am sure many of them were killed, just summarily executed without a trial or even an investigation,” Izmailov said. He is convinced that 90% of them were innocent.

“That is why this case stands out as an artificial show trial and leaves a lot of questions unanswered. What about thousands of innocent people who perished without having any recourse to the law? Who will answer for this lawlessness?”

Temirbulatov pleaded guilty to killing the 32-year-old Mitryayev, a contract soldier who joined up to fight in Chechnya for the money. The Chechen denied the other charges.

During the trial, Temirbulatov cited in his defense the ancient tradition of blood feud, which still exists in Chechnya.

He insisted that he was obliged to kill Mitryayev, who he claimed had raped and killed his cousin. He alleged that the soldier had tried to sell a necklace that belonged to her in the market in the Chechen town of Shatoi. The prosecution contested that claim.

Mitryayev, married with two children, went to Chechnya in 1995 because he was desperate for work to support his family, his mother said.

“He said: ‘Mom, don’t worry. I am not going there to kill people. I will be driving a truck, I’ll make money, buy a house and you will live with me.’ But even then I felt I would never see him again,” Tamara Mitryayev said.

Her son disappeared in 1996, but she learned of his fate only last year when his bones were found and later exhumed for proper burial.

In Soviet times, Temirbulatov was a member of his town’s council, a model worker driving tractors on a collective farm in Chechnya, and a winner of merit certificates and even a car, according to his lawyer, Dalkhat Daduyev, who plans to appeal the sentence.

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Sergei L. Loiko of The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.